Everything about Finery Forge totally explained
Iron tapped from the
blast furnace is
pig iron, and contains significant amounts of
carbon and
silicon. To produce malleable
wrought iron, it needs to undergo a
further process. In the early modern period, this was carried out in a
finery forge.
There were several types of finery forges. The dominant type in
Sweden was the
German forge, which had a single
hearth that was used for all processes. In
Uppland north of
Stockholm and certain adjacent provinces, another kind known as the
Walloon forge was used, mainly for the production of a particularly pure kind of iron known as
oregrounds iron, which was exported to England to make
blister steel. Its purity depended on the use of ore from the
Dannemora mine. The Walloon forge was virtually the only kind used in
Great Britain. This had two kinds of hearth, the
finery and the
chafery. In the finery, the finer remelted
pig iron so as to oxidise the carbon (and silicon). This produced a lump of iron (with some
slag) known as a
bloom. This was consolidated using a water-powered hammer (see
trip hammer) and returned to the finery. The next stages were undertaken by the hammerman. His work was
to draw the bloom out into a bar to produce what was known as
bar iron. In the course of doing so, he'd to reheat the iron, for which he used the chafery. The fuel in the finery had to be
charcoal, because impurities in any mineral fuel would affect the quality of the iron.
This is an obsolete process of making
iron. The finery forge process began to be replaced from the late
18th century by others, of which
puddling was the most successful. These used mineral fuel (
coal or
coke), and freed the iron industry from its dependence on the speed of growth of trees. That transition is the
industrial revolution for the
iron industry.
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